Electronic systems are typically assembled through the use of electrical or optical connectors having a plug part and a socket part which interconnect. The electrical or optical connectors include, but are not limited to, circuit board to circuit board connectors, cable to circuit board connectors, and cable to cable connectors. In certain applications, the plug part of the connector is inserted and extracted from the socket part of the connector many times. For example, when testing a circuit board product, a manufacturer inserts and extracts many circuit boards from a single test interface connector. The connector's sockets, therefore, wear out and the electrical connection between any given circuit board and the test interface degrades over time and therefore affects the lifetime or useful life of the electronic system or assemblies. Further, lifetime or useful life of optical transceiver modules depends on many factors including transient conditions during power cycle, electronic components useful life such as capacitors, insertion/removal cycles and environmental conditions, gas, dust, contamination, voltage, current density, temperature, humidity, mechanical stress, vibration, shock, radiation, pressure, and intensity of magnetic and electrical fields, etc. The transient conditions during insertion/removal cycles are important factors affecting the lifetime of a removable electronic assembly (such as Optical Transceiver Modules).
Optical transceiver modules use electrical and optical connectors to convert signals between electrical signals and optical waveforms. Examples of types of optical transceivers modules include: Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP), small form-factor pluggable plus (SFP+), 10 Gigabit Small Form Factor Pluggable (XFP), 10 Gigabit Ethernet Transceiver Package (XENPAK), XFF converter, 10 Gigabit Ethernet Transceiver Package—shorter than XENPAK (XPAK), 10 Gigabit Small Form Factor Pluggable-Extended (XFP-E), Small form-factor 10 Gb/s pluggable fiber optic transceiver (X2), Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable Plus (QSFP+), etc. These modules have a limited number of insertion/removal cycles, i.e., the total number of times a module can be inserted (into one or more hosts) and guaranteed to work properly or satisfy a minimum level of operating characteristics. As defined in Multi Source Agreement (MSA) standards, a guaranteed threshold of a typical fifty (50) insertion/removal cycles requirement should be met by the vendors for optical transceiver modules. The vendors for optical transceiver modules, therefore, provide slightly better threshold than a typical fifty (50) insertion/removal cycles requirement. Depending on the usage, it is important to know when the insertion/removal cycles of the optical transceiver modules have exceeded this limit and is therefore an important factor to be considered in the maintenance and troubleshooting of a network system. Unfortunately, there is no feature or provision available in industry standard optical transceiver modules which provide a method of tracking/monitoring when the threshold number of insertion and removal cycles (e.g., fifty) has been exceeded and is therefore an unsolved engineering problem. Many original equipment manufacturers (OEM) include warnings or notices in their product specifications to the end user to minimize the number of insertion/removal cycles for the optical transceiver modules as such insertions/removals will reduce the lifetime of the optical transceiver modules.
Contract manufacturers, interoperability test labs, software quality assurance (SQA) labs, hardware quality assurance (HQA) labs, compliance test labs, etc. are a few examples of where these optical transceivers are used in a rotation and this insertion/removal issue remains an unsolved problem for them to figure out when those optical transceivers have exceeded their lifetime or useful life and can possibly be contributing in traffic related failures. As a result, this negatively affects the performance of their networking products and cause an increase cost of maintenance which could be trying to solve traffic related problems without knowing the actual root cause which can be the end of life Optical Transceiver modules. Further, this issue could cause a high rate of return for electronic assemblies which in fact only failed because of end of life optical transceiver modules.
Consequently, a method for tracking the number of insertion/removal cycles of an optical transceiver module and providing a notification when the number of insertion/removal cycles has exceeded a threshold cycle count is needed.